Episode #113 – The Real Voice

(M) So the Body together cannot allow a stranger’s voice either. Because if one in the Body hears the stranger’s voice it’s going to… it’s going to be disturbing. And this particular situation happened to be very disturbing to the Body. And we’ve had to stop and deal with it, and say, this is the stranger’s voice; even if, even though it’s good, appears good, it is not the Shepherd, because I want to be so familiar with His Voice that my spirit registers when it’s the stranger speaking, even if I like it. You know? The enemy is deceptive and comes with not just criticism, but flattery. (J) Hmhum. And I see that, you know, we can flatter our self, and tell, tell our self to counter the rejection we feel. But really, if it’s not from God, it’s not God. And if it’s not God, then it’s rejection of God. If you call something God that’s not God, it’s rejection of God. (M) And I still say it’s your being God yourself. (J) Absolutely. (M) Creating your own God that you, that you can control. And He absolutely will not be controlled, or even defined. He will not…. We cannot project on Him, He won’t enter that conversation. (J) I think that’s when we go into heresy and deception and all kinds of weirdness, is when we are really coming to God and trying to gain the acceptance that we so desire, and manufacturing it. All kinds of stuff can happen, all kinds of weird bazaar things. And He says that you, you, I mean, He wants it clean and you have to go and you have to repent and you have to hear Him, and He has to you know… You have to go in that route, through repentance and the blood, and then the acceptance is there. Not expecting your performance, but He does want you to take your, your ‘gunk’ to Him and say, yes, this is who I am, and without You I’m lost here, and I need Your blood to cleanse this, because this is… Not saying ok, now go perform, no; His acceptance is our acceptance of His Son. (M) And He says if you seek Me, you will find Me. Who is it we’re seeking? Are we seeking to be beaten up once again? Or are we seeking to love ourselves again? What, what, Who are you really seeking, because if you seek Him you will find Him. (J) And for years I really took that scripture to Him, and I’d say wait a minute, I am seeking You, why am I not finding You? And I believe that I wasn’t seeking Him, I was hearing another voice. I was hearing the rejection of my past, and, and believing His rejection. It was so loud that He couldn’t speak. (M) Hmhum. But He has answered you. (J) Well, absolutely. (M) And He’s making you an expert in this. And He is using you and your question and your search and your suffering and your agony, and your constant seeking, coming back to seek Him. He’s using all that to give you a voice for this very thing; to the nations really. (J) Well the thing that I, that I’m seeing is that He didn’t answer my prayer when I’m seek, seek, seek, seek this way, I seek Him this way, I seek Him this way, doing this, doing that. It’s that I, when I committed I will hear You, I will hear You in every situation. I want Your Voice to be preeminent. Do You hear me God? He said ok, here we go. I’m like wow. And that, you know, I don’t know where this is going to go, because He’s going to have to define it because He’s God. (M) Well you know, when Satan tempted Jesus, and when he was talking to Jesus in Jesus’ vulnerability in the wilderness, Jesus’ answer was “Man shall not live…” He was tempting Him to make His own bread. That’s what this is John, it’s making your own bread. And Jesus said, No, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” That means it’s a personal conversation, an intimate personal thing; it’s not a corporate thing; and it’s, it’s life. Without the Voice, you do not have life. Without hearing Him you just ‘exist’ in some low level that you don’t have to. (J) I’m seeing the fruit of that. I’m seeing the fruit of not hearing Him according to what He wants to say and hearing something else; and hearing Him, when He wants to say what He wants to say how He wants to say it. It’s amazing. (M) Describe the fruit then. What fruit are you talking about? (J) Well I can see that the fruit of the whole hearing the rejection was death. It was further rejection. (M) Uh-huh, reinforcement. (J) It reinforced it and built it. It was a mountain, mounting up. You know, it just continued. Every time I’d go to Him it just proved again that ‘I’m rejected’. Well, when I actually go to Him and say I don’t care what’s going on, I want to hear You. Then I go, oh, wait a minute. Now He may come to me and, you know, He may come to me and tell me, you know tell me, I don’t know what He’s going to tell me. Today it was pretty amazing. But just because He would chastise me or correct me doesn’t mean I’m being rejected. But if you believe in that rejection, every correction… and the Father has to correct us, but if you believe in rejection every correction, every correction and chastisement is further rejection mounting up. And you never get into really Him. (M) I’m reminded of some years ago this situation, which is just a very practical one, where someone kind of abused me in a practical situation, and I said “no” to her. And she was kind of miffed at me for some time, but I would not budge on my ‘no’. I was the same with her; I would chat with her and laugh with her and be available to her. Some months later she came back to me and said, Martha you have a ministry to the Body of Christ, and the name of the ministry is “no”. (Martha laughs) I said what do you mean? She said I always believed ‘no’ was rejection, but it’s simply “no.” You simply said no. You didn’t reject me, you didn’t leave me, you just said no. And she said it has changed my life because I, I now understand that ‘no’ is not rejection, it’s just ‘no’. It was amazing to me and I’ve thought of it, oh, a thousand times over the years; that’s true. But we are so sensitive when we are living in unforgiveness; I’m going to say unforgiveness instead of rejection. We’re so sensitive and our feelings get so hurt over any opposition, even somebody’s right to say stop or no. So then that is, that creates a breach where there wasn’t one; creates a further involvement. And this to me is so tied to “The Great Lie”, because this is where you go when you believe ‘the lie’. (J) Hmhum. (M) But do you see John? Ok, here He has you set up in this ministry, and you have a voice into wherever it goes in the world, we don’t even know. He gave you this problem in your life to solve by forgiveness, acceptance, humility, faith in the Word of God and in Him. He gave you this problem to overcome so that you could be the beacon for others to overcome it. So do you see the sovereign, defined, glorious purpose for giving you the problem? (J) Absolutely. (M) Because I don’t, I wouldn’t have gotten this solution like you have gotten it. He has given you the secret as you have said I want to hear You, the real One. He has given you the secret. And we’ve been blown away, using that trite term, we’ve just been overwhelmed by the response to this thing about rejection we’re doing. And there’s more to come, because people understand what you’re saying, and what we’re talking about; what Carole is saying, people are being set free. It’s like dominoes, it’s just toppling on and on and on. And it’s so exciting that this is breaking the yoke of rejection. It’s a yoke, it’s a bondage, it’s a prison. It is a prison of belief and of unbelief. You believe in rejection and you don’t believe in acceptance. So, but it’s just amazing to me that you only become rich through a problem that you work to solve, and that you are transparent enough, John, to talk about in terms of your weakness and failure. But what you don’t see is how you have overcome it, and you’ve learned to… If anyone will hear, let him hear. (J) You know what I’m seeing? You know where it says about ‘if you have anything against your brother when you come to the altar’? He’s saying, ok, that’s exactly what this is. You have, you have an offense, or someone has an offense with you, whatever. You have that and you go to God. He knows that if we have anything against our brother, that if we go to Him with our offering, we will transfer that problem to Him. It may not be anything… (M) Oh, it’s huge. He’s shown me that any resistance to anybody is resistance to Him. Any resistance, any rejection of any situation in your life is a rejection of Him. They’re so inter-connected, because He is God, and He is sovereign. So it’s, it’s so constant, the temptation to put up a barrier to Him. (J) It’s inevitable. (M) Ah. It’s everybody’s problem. (J) And if you have something, some offense, it’s inevitable you’ll transfer it to Him or others around you. Hey, come, come clean to Me, come clean to your brother, come clean to people. (M) Hmhum. (J) And it’s a work; it’s a work. But it’s only a, it’s only a burden when you allow it to compound. (M) I was just thinking John that this is… we’re speaking of it on sort of a normal level. But if this bitterness grows to such a degree then actually the person becomes as the Lord said to Isaiah, ‘go to this people, but they will not hear’. And it’s even in the New Testament several times, ‘keep on listening, but you will not hear or understand and turn and be healed’. You have to hear in order to be healed. And the discipleship calling, the Lord says ‘if they will not hear you, wipe the dust off your feet and leave that town’. And that means, because I’ve sought it out, deeply, it means I have no further responsibility, if you won’t hear me, then what’s left? There’s nothing left to do. It’s up to us to hear. And my mother had a saying. She died when I was young, so I don’t have many sayings, but here was one of hers that stays with me; ‘if you don’t know, I can’t tell you’. That means if you don’t have some kind of ‘hearing’ in you, then there’s no point in my telling you. You don’t listen. And He gave me a scripture in 1 John 4:6, some time ago. And it says, “We are from God”, and that word means we belong to God. “He who knows God listens to us. The one who is not from God, or does not belong to God, does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of Truth and the spirit of error.” How do we know? By whether or not they can hear. Whether or not they’re willing to hear. As Jeremiah said, “They refuse to know me by refusing to hear Me.” Our knowing God is going to be all about hearing. It’s just so basic to walking with Him. It’s the basis of a relationship. If you were not heard in a relationship, there’s no relationship. I, I’ve many times in my life… I’ve lived long enough to know that I can tell somebody something and they’ll say no, that’s not how you feel. So why did I speak? (Laughter) If you know my thoughts and you know my heart, then I’m, I’m a superfluous. I’m erased. And even worse than that is when you speak your heart and then they use your words to attack you, misunderstanding entirely your meaning, and then not letting you explain your meaning. It goes so far as that level of deception, all from bitterness and unforgiveness. You go insane. I think I’m trying to be kind. The word is insane. And one time I was struggling with someone; I don’t even remember who or what situation, but the Lord said’ if you reason with an insane person, you are insane to do it’. Because in that level the reprobate mind, at the end of Romans one, is the absolute…not only the inability to hear, but the twisting of the word so you are attacked for your words. It goes to even that far. A reprobate mind is a mind so given over to self and to the devil that there’s no reasoning left to do. But I feel like, John, you have put your finger… God has revealed this to you, and you’ve put your finger on the explanation that could set people free to hear God, and for their lives to be healed. It’s a matter of life and healing to hear His voice, and to live by His Voice. And there’s always the attack on that Voice, especially if you’ve heard something important and life changing… the onslaught of doubt that attacks you. Did you really hear that? Oh, that couldn’t be. The onslaught is terrific against the Voice of God in your life. You have to be so grounded in His Voice, and so dependant on His Voice, because there will be an onslaught against the very thing He says. Sometimes a vicious attack on that very ground. (J) There’s the ‘chatter’, and there’s ‘The Voice’. (M) Yeah. And there’s ‘the lie’ against the Voice. I consider it the flaming dart to…what is it that quenches the flaming dart? “The shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.” And that faith is, do I hear Him? Have I heard Him? And the enemy comes to say either, no you haven’t, or that the truth is something other than what you’ve heard. And the faith has to be in His voice. His Voice is Him, and He is the source of Life and Reality. He is the Truth and the Way. A minister asked a friend of mine recently, “What is the truth?”, and she said, “The Truth is a Person”. (Laughter) She’s very clear on that one; the Truth is a Person. The truth is not a fact; it’s a Person. And if you are listening to the facts of Christianity, you are out of touch with God and have rejected Him. That’s what religion is. It is listening to the laws and the facts, instead of the Person; the doctrines, the concepts, the creeds, instead of the Person. And you have to throw all that you are onto that Person, and trust that you really are walking with a Person who is telling you the realities. That’s the faith; the faith has to be in the Person in that He is trustworthy, and you stake your life… I am staking my life, literally, on what He tells me; and casting all myself and my being and my world, onto that Voice. (J) And He’s committed to speaking and to telling you. (M) And bless Him; He has to tell me over and over, the same thing, so I’ll get it. He’s so long suffering. But if you will hear Him, He will affirm you; He’ll just keep helping you by telling you the same thing over and over again; and through many sources. Grace, grace, grace to such dumb sheep. (Laughter)

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